Sorry for the lack of posting, we were pretty busy the first few days here and then I got some nasty food poisoning or something so I was a little out of commission. Lots of updates to come all in a row now, here is Monday:
This morning we had to leave the hotel at 8:25am to go to our first day at Peking University. We are studying specifically at the Guanghua School of Management with a course called “Doing Business in China.” Everything was set up really nicely when we got there and we have some nice Peking U swag to take home. We got a bound book of all the notes and schedule and everything we will need for the whole week. We had a short introductory session first where they try to teach us a little Chinese (everything except Ni Hao still pretty much goes over my head though) and we also watched a promotional video about the school. There were a bunch of exchange students talking about the school and there was one group from Miami of Ohio!
We get lots of breaks at school during the day and it is pretty nice and a new building so there is a snack/tea area right outside our room and this lady just restocks it and cleans up after us all day which is pretty sweet. We had our first class after that which was about supply chain and manufacturing in China. Nothing too revolutionary, but interesting to hear things from a Chinese perspective. After class we went to lunch in the school cafeteria. Nobody really knows what anything is so it’s a big mystery. I had some sort of mild beef & broccoli looking dish and lots of steamed rice and lo mein.
After lunch we had our first company visit which was at a really nice hotel. It was a bunch of private equity executives (one of them is the father of the Chinese student on our trip) and it was also completely in Chinese. We all went into a meeting room and everyone had a little headset in front of them and channel 1 was for Chinese and 2 for English. There was a lady sitting in a booth in the back of the room who did live translation for everything. It was still a little hard to follow (especially since I wasn’t really familiar with the topic) and I think some questions from our class and their responses were lost in translation but I guess that’s how things go in China. We had 2 formal presentations followed by Q&A. All the presentations were shown on 2 screens, one for each language, so at least there was always stuff to look at.
After the presentations we went to the hotel restaurant downstairs for dinner with the executives. They brought out this rice liquor called Mautai that he said was like $200 (US$) and it came in a bottle that looked like lighter fluid and they kept making toasts and we were all supposed to take shots but it tasted so nasty I only had 2 of them. The whole group went through an entire case of the stuff; I think the Chinese executives took down a bunch of it. The meal was similar to the lunch we had the day before with all the cold dishes brought out first followed by hot ones and nobody knew what anything was. The round table with the lazy susan seems to be the common trend here for our group dinners. I ate a lot of rice, seems to be my favorite food here in China.
After dinner our bus took us back to the hotel and everyone got ready to go out for the night. We went to this university bar district since it is cheaper than a lot of other areas and went to this bar called Lush which was just chill and pretty much like a normal US bar. It wasn’t very crowded since it was a Monday night and apparently Peking U exams are coming up in 2 weeks. It was a fun night to hang out with everyone on the trip though and we got some late night McDonald’s (delicious!) and got back to the hotel around 2am so I headed right to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment